Word: knacks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Such poets as Sandburg, Masters, Riding are brutally panned; kindlier treated are Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Euripides and his translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Housman was no great minor poet; he was a man obsessed by an adolescent sense of death, with a knack for popular expression of it. Yeats used magic as Dante used Catholicism, as the spine or frame that great poetry needs. But T. E. Lawrence exemplifies the desperation, the brilliance, the failure, of the man of genius who can find no frame...
Least anyone forget (and he will remind you himself) Dante is the one and only and rightful successor, to the long line of Kellers and Thurstons. Not only is his wizardry completely baffling even to the wiseguys in the first row, but Dante has the knack of setting off each illusion with settings as grandiose as Little Egypt or Barnum and Breley. "Sim Sala Bim" is not just a series of card tricks but a continuous spectacle. One minute Dante draws gallos of beer from a dry keg, the next he is producing ghosts from empty cabinets and making...
...privileged to address with the familiar "thou." He was an officer in World War I, then turned his attention to large-scale farming on his estates near Razgrad. Grooming him to succeed scholarly Premier Professor Bogdan Filoff, the Axis called him to Berlin last week to learn the knack of dictating under orders, then on to Rome for further instructions...
...sized man with wise eyes, stooped shoulders, and a burning conviction that journalism is the most important profession in the world. In themselves, these attributes would not make him unique. The quality that long ago lifted Scripps-Howard's Clapper out of the ruck of columnists is his knack of translating some event into sound sense on the very day that people want to hear about it. Somehow he manages to move mentally a half-step faster than the mass mind. Farmers rocking on their porch chairs in the evening, clubmen lounging beside an afternoon cocktail, come to Clapper...
...Enough craziness left in me too, underneath all the brilliance! If I had not inherited the knack of order, the trick of saving myself, a whole system of protective devices-where should I be? Madness I loathe-abhor from my soul, beyond all power to utter, hate in my bones all crack-brained geniuses and near-geniuses, all emotionalism, eccentric gesturing and posturing, extravagance! Boldness, yes, audacity, boldness is all, the one indispensable thing - but quiet, decorous, wedded to the proprieties, velvet-shod with irony. That is how I am, that is what I will...